Overcome Email Overload with Eudora 5 Errata and Additional Tips

The only error that I think is important is that Light Mode won't let you change a message's label with a filter. That's pretty key to the prioritization strategy in Chapter 2.

Factual Errors

• On page 196, I say that you should put a checkmark in the Excerpts box. This is exactly backwards: it should say to UNcheck the box.
• Tom Lehmann spells his name with two "n"s (p.16). (Sorry, Tom!)
• Mood Watch works in Light mode, not just Paid and Sponsored mode. (p.169)
• On page 39, twice I mention Figures 3 and 4 when I should say Figures 2 and 3.

Errors of Omission

• I didn't mention that these features don't work in Light mode:
  • Stationery (p.141)
  • Personalities (p.57)
  • Filtering options Make Label (important! p.39), Play Sound (p.51), Open Message/Mailbox (p.49)
  • FCC (p.55)
  • Regular expressions (Windows only) (p.83)

• If you use "intersects nickname" conditions in an outgoing filter (as on p.41), and are using the Windows version of Eudora, then you should put a check in the Automatically expand nicknames box on the Tools->Options->Miscellaneous page. Otherwise, the "intersects nickname" condition on outgoing messages might not always find the messages it should.

• I wasn't clear about the behavior of the Space key (p.91-93). When using Windows with the Preview Pane, the first time you hit Space, Eudora will open the current message in its own window. The subsequent Spaces will move you through the message until you get to the end of the message, when Space will open the next message in its own window. Eudora for Mac OS will not open the message in its own window.

Index

• sound p.51
• FCC should be p. 55
• personalities p.57
• a list of all the features not in Light Mode
• regular expression, see regexp
• regexp should have entry for p.83
• regexp "where to find further information" should be p.84

Typos

• Page 224, fourth word should be "in" and not "inn".
• Page 251, "labels" and "settings" in the caption for Figure 41 should be capitalized.
• Page 224, "company chart" should be "organization chart".

Tips

• One of my most respected reviewers suggests that Light users can use priority levels in much the same way that the book discusses categories. "In my world, priorities are (1) rarely used and (2) even more rarely helpful. Thus, hijacking them has few downsides."

• The same reviewer also strongly encouraged me to mention a filter that he uses for finding spam: if his address is not in either the To or Cc line, consider it junk mail.

  I didn't put that in the book because it is somewhat dangerous, and you shouldn't use it unless you have enough filters earlier that stop processing on messages from people you care about. There are legitimate uses of Bcc, as I talk about in the book (see p.123). If you treat all Bcc messages as junk, you might miss some important mail.

• You can type any header into the Header: box (shown by the arrow in Figure 9, p. 45). You are not limited to using what is in the drop-down menu.

  For example, a reader reports that a lot of his spam now has the date of 2016. You can find messages that are dated far in the future by typing Date: into the Header: box, selecting does not contain, and typing in 2001. If you don't want to change this filter every year, you could look for 200 instead of 2001.

• With Eudora for Mac OS, you can easily change the label of a message that is open in its own window. Click and hold on the thin colored line at the top of the message (shown by the arrow marked "Red" in Figure 43, p. 253). You'll get a drop-down menu, from which you can choose a new label.

  (If the message has no label, there won't be a thin colored line, but you can still change the label by clicking where the line would be.)

• Control-d will delete all the selected messages.

• Eudora keeps the In, Out, and Trash mailboxes in memory (RAM). If Eudora is acting slower than you think it should, try moving messages out of In, Out, and Trash. You might want to call the new mailboxes something like In-old, Out-old.

• When you delete messages, even if you transfer them to Trash and empty the trash, the messages are not truly deleted from the mailbox file. They are only deleted from the list of messages, or Table Of Contents (.toc) file.

  Thus, if you really need to get a message back:

  1. Quit from Eudora.
  2. Find that mailbox' file. It will be in your Eudora folder and have the same name as the mailbox.
  3. Copy the file. Give it a slightly different name.
  4. Restart Eudora.
  5. Eudora will rebuild the table of contents for the new mailbox, and your old message should be in there.
  Note that you should not rebuild the original mailbox' table of contents, only a copy's. The rebuilding process will mess up some of the message status information.

  Another implication of messages not really being gone is that the still-present messages take up still-present space. If you look at the bottom of a list of messages (above the preview pane, if present), you'll see three numbers, such as:

  253/1047K/19K

  The first number is the number of messages. The second number is the amount of space those messages take. The third number is the amount of space that messages marked for deletion still take up.

  If you click on the third number, Eudora will compact the messages in that mailbox. It should then become zero, such as:

  253/1047K/0K

• If you get an account at a major provider (e.g. Yahoo, Hotmail, Juno), you should take some care to make your user ID hard to guess. Spammers have started guessing email addresses based on dictionary lookups. So instead of choosing a name like greenheart@aol.com or jroberts@hotmail.com, choose something like j7roberts.

• For your public account, you might like to use a forwarding service that strips spam out for you. See Google's Open Directory has a list under Top:Computers:Internet:E-mail:Forwarding

• There is a neat feature called Group by Subject which is different from sorting by subject. Group by Subject groups together any messages that are near each other in the mailbox (as currently sorted) and that have the same subject line. Messages that do not share a subject line are not affected; messages that are far apart with the same subject line are not affected.

  To use Group by Subject, select Special->Sort->Group by Subject (Mac OS) or right-click on any colun header, then select Group by Subject (Windows).

• If you are using Eudora for Mac OS and someone puts a URL in a message but forgets the "http://", you can Command-double-click to get to the Web site. Alas, anything after the first "/" will get ignored, however, so clicking on "www.oeo.webfoot.com/eudora/html" will take you to "www.oeo.webfoot.com".

If you know any Eudora tricks that aren't in the book, please send email to eudoraTips@webfoot.com